More Than Just Marines Behaving Badly

By Alexander Mccoy

March 8, 2017

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CreditCreditScott Olson/Getty Images

Hundreds of Marines, mostly on active duty, are being investigated for circulating on Facebook photos of unclad women, including fellow Marines, without their consent. These Marines, part of a Facebook group called Marines United, also posted plans for stalking and harassing women in those photos.

This is just the latest attention such groups have received. A 2014 article in Task & Purpose, a publication for military veterans, reported on similar Facebook groups of active-duty Marines, which still exist today.

As someone who served for six years in the Marine Corps, I’ve seen my share of this kind of behavior among Marines in person and on the internet. The problem is not Facebook as a platform or “a few bad apples.” It’s the culture the Marine Corps has created and done little to change.

The Marine Corps, unlike every other service branch, segregates recruits by sex during basic training. When I went through boot camp in 2008, my fellow male Marines and I were taught to look down on our female counterparts. In my all-male platoon, my drill instructors called female Marines sluts and told stories about women’s supposedly poor personal hygiene out in the field. The message we got was clear: Female Marines are disgusting and worthless and physically unsuited for the service.

We rarely encountered the women or saw them train, and we were given the strong impression that the female recruits underwent less rigorous training than us. Obstacle course stations would have what my drill instructors described as the “female,” or easier, version alongside the “male,” or more difficult, version. The drill instructors for the female recruits made them chant embarrassing cadences such as “Prance like a pony!” while half-stepping their formation past us, to humiliate them. Every interaction I had with female Marines in basic training, and every reference to them, seemed intended to foster contempt.

My platoon even had a “slut wall.” This drill-instructor-approved bulletin board was where recruits posted photos of girlfriends who broke up with them during training. The unspoken, but clearly understood, rule was that the raunchier these photos were, the better.

Once I completed training and joined my unit, the pattern didn’t change. Receiving a “Dear John” letter from a girlfriend or wife was a common experience, but the reactions often took on a toxic flavor of revenge. Text message chains including photos of a naked woman who allegedly cheated on her Marine partner came with instructions to share the photos far and wide to “make her famous.”

On overseas bases, Marines circulated hard drives that held everything from pirated copies of popular TV shows to pornography. Among the pornography, there was almost always a collection of photos of naked fellow service members.

When I was a junior lance corporal, my sergeant explained to me that these photos would end up on the hard drives when servicewomen would email them from communal computers to boyfriends and husbands back home, and then not fully delete them. Enterprising Marines would check the computers for these photos and add them to the universe of circulating hard drives, without the knowledge of the women.

This is the environment that encourages things like the Marines United Facebook group, which had nearly 30,000 members before it was disbanded. I don’t believe that this behavior is simply the inevitable consequence of having an organization with large numbers of young men. Rather, it is the result of tolerating a culture where female Marines are treated with contempt, defined solely as sexual objects unworthy of the job and as distractions to the men.

Full gender integration in the Marine Corps would help. Of all the service branches, the Marines have by far the smallest proportion of women in their ranks. Until combat roles were integrated recently, the most prestigious jobs with the corps explicitly excluded women.

But history shows that when women were first allowed to fly jets or serve on submarines in the other branches, they thrived; their value is now undisputed. When the Army, Navy and Air Force place men and women alongside one another right from basic training, women exist as individuals and colleagues, not as an abstract, setting the tone for how men view female colleagues for the rest of their careers. To be sure, sexism — not to mention, sexual assault — happens in the other branches, but it is revealing that scandals like these Facebook groups continue to emerge from the Marines, the service that lags the most in gender integration and struggles with the highest rate of sexual assault of all branches.

If our leaders are serious about making the Marine Corps the best it can be, and if they want to avoid repeated scandals, they must change the culture. They should start by fully integrating recruit training, instituting gender-neutral standards and making clear up and down the chain of command that this kind of behavior isn’t a joke or a normal part of building cohesion but a weakness — and a betrayal of our core values of honor, courage and commitment.

Alexander McCoy, a former sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, is a founder of Common Defense, an organization of progressive veterans and military family members.